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His Dog Tags Don't Come Off

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HAZARDOUS DUTY An American Soldier in the Twentieth Century. By John K. Singlaub with Malcolm McConnell. Illustrated. 574 pp. New York: Summit Books. $24.95.

Singlaub? The name resonates vaguely. Isn't he the general who got himself in hot water with Jimmy Carter? Didn't he have something to do with the Iran-contra affair? "Hazardous Duty" is a memoir of the 45-year career of Maj. Gen. John K. Singlaub, most recently in the public eye for his role in supplying the Nicaraguan contras. He emerges as a conundrum -- an archconservative soldier who favored racial integration of the armed forces early on, who agreed that President Harry Truman had to fire Gen. Douglas MacArthur from his Korean War command, who found the My Lai massacre in a league with Nazi atrocities and who calls Oliver North the "gullible dupe" of international arms hustlers.

General Singlaub's career alternated upfront Army billets with shadowy missions in clandestine wars: behind enemy lines in Nazi-occupied France, in China on the eve of the Communist victory, with the C.I.A. in the subzero season of the cold war, running covert operations in South Korea. In Vietnam, General Singlaub headed an outfit opaquely entitled the Studies and Observations Group. His real job was to organize sabotage, guerrilla warfare and psychological dirty tricks. Some of those tricks sound more like postadolescent pranks. General Singlaub gleefully describes a sham resistance movement that broadcast news to North Vietnam about Communist officers at home seducing the wives of soldiers fighting in the South.

In the most off-the-wall Singlaub enterprise, North Vietnamese peasants and fishermen were kidnapped and taken to an island that had been set up to look like a piece of "liberated" North Vietnam. There the captives were fed banquet meals, had their ills tended to and their teeth fixed, were showered with luxuries and finally allowed to go home, presumably to spread the word about the joys of life under South Vietnamese rule. Your tax dollars at work.

General Singlaub emerges here as a cold war die-hard, even with no cold war left to fight. Perestroika, glasnost and the meltdown of the Eastern bloc are to him merely strategic retreats while "the Soviet Union is regrouping."

Despite its political rigidity, however, this memoir does have a rewarding dimension. It is a revealing self-portrait of that perennial figure of history -- the professional soldier. General Singlaub recalls sailing home from World War II as the men with him "talked longingly of normal peacetime lives, of college, families, of the dream homes they would build in the suburbs and the cars they would drive to them." General Singlaub opted instead for long separations from his family while he dared death in global hot spots. One cannot help feeling a certain sympathy for this gruff, honest soldier. He tells of enrolling in his spare time in college, where some instructors looked upon him as a curious relic of a bygone age. Their prejudices puzzled him. Do liberals really believe that the military enjoys war, he wondered. That, he reasoned, is "as logical as assuming surgeons enjoy cancer."

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But in the end, the good soldier self-destructed. The Washington Post quoted General Singlaub, in what the general assumed was an off-the-record briefing, as criticizing President Carter's proposal for cutting United States forces in Korea. He was called on the White House carpet by Mr. Carter himself. General Singlaub managed to escape with his skin and his rank, but less than a year later, during a lecture at a college, he publicly questioned Mr. Carter's national security policies and was essentially forced to retire.

In mufti, General Singlaub became a missionary for the gospel of the right: "The Soviets are not born-again Christians. They are in fact born-again Bolsheviks." He revived the American chapter of an outfit called the World Anti-Communist League and announced he was going to keep out the racists, anti-Semites, neo-Nazis and other kooks who he admits infested the organization in the past.

When, in 1984, the Boland Amendment cut off military aid to the contras, General Singlaub found a new cause. He solicited foreign governments and American fat cats for contra aid. Then, after the Iran-contra affair blew up, Ollie North, General Singlaub feels, tried to suck him into the morass. Mr. North, he believes, told Congressional investigators that the arms company General Singlaub used to supply the contras was engaged in espionage against the West. But no illegality ever attached to General Singlaub's efforts.

He confesses that, 13 years out of the Army, he still wears his dog tags. That pretty much sums him up, a soldier to the core. In this readable, often engaging memoir (written with Malcolm McConnell), Jack Singlaub sounds like the kind of guy you would want with you in the trenches. But not necessarily after the shooting stops.

A version of this review; biography appears in print on August 4, 1991, on Page 7007006 of the National edition with the headline: His Dog Tags Don't Come Off. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe